Here's to the hopeful ones

A while back, I started a tradition to listen to my favorite albums all the way through each time I drive the 6 hours back home. One of those "albums" that's always is my CD player isn't really an album, but it's a favorite nonetheless. It's actually a copy of a live concert by The Lone Bellow, from a show they played in Minneapolis a few years ago.  One song that I never skip over is  "Tree to Grow." Just last week I was rushing somewhere, frustrated at Nashville traffic when I heard these sweet lyrics quietly playing through my speakers: 

“I’ll never leave, I’ll always stay. I swear on all that I keep safe.”

These words kept rattling around with me all day, and a few hours later I'd forgotten what I was frustrated about in the first place. We all try to go about our normal routines, but sometimes you encounter the tiniest thing that moves around all the pieces of your heart like furniture. Maybe it comes from living in Nashville for a little while, but I kept coming back to that verse and thinking about the songwriters' purpose behind the words.

And then it hit me: as humans, we're pretty fearful creatures.

Sure, some of us appear fearless and more put-together than others, but at the end of the day, we're all bumbling around trying to figure out how to do life and are all scared of so many things at once. And what we need most are people that will stick around when the fear seems too big. People that make promises and have no intentions of breaking them, bringing reassurance instead of worry into our lives. What if we started holding each other to that higher standard? What if we all agreed to help each other out, rather than add more weight to our neighbors' shoulders just because we can't agree on political issues? Call me crazy, but if we just pitched in and loved each other a tiny bit more, maybe, just maybe we'd be a bit less fearful. Encountering goodness in someone allows light to stomp out the darkness. There's a lot of hard things in life, but I'll keep cheering for the positive side every time, because light deserves to take up space in the world, too. 

With that, 28 new tracks have been added to the Boombox playlist. May they give you an excuse to dance in the kitchen or be a little less frustrated at traffic. Track 1 will hopefully be familiar to you. 

Listen here.